Thursday was Ethan's scheduled day off.
He woke up at nine-thirty AM, which for him was practically late afternoon. The rain had returned overnight, a steady, gentle patter against his bedroom window that made the apartment feel extra dark and cozy.
Ethan lived in a small, slightly cramped one-bedroom apartment on the second floor of an old brick building four blocks away from the record shop. The place was littered with stacks of paperbacks, random audio cables coiled on the floor, and a small wooden dining table that currently held three half-disassembled cassette decks and a soldering iron.
He shuffled into the kitchen wearing a faded grey bathrobe and a pair of plaid pajama pants, his hair sticking straight up on one side.
He filled his old metal moka pot with ground coffee, set it on the stove, and waited for it to sputter.
While the coffee was brewing, he picked up his phone from the counter. There were two messages.
One was from Leo: Hey man, where do we keep the extra paper bags? A guy just bought six LPs and I can't find the big ones.
Ethan typed back: Bottom shelf under the counter, behind the wire cutters.
The second message was from Maya, sent about twenty minutes ago: Hey. Bakery's slow today because of the rain. If you're not dead from the couch, wanna grab coffee at that weird diner near the bridge at 11?
Ethan stared at the screen for a second. His brain was still foggy from sleep, but he felt a small, pleasant buzz in his chest.
He typed back: Yeah, I'm down. My back hurts, but I can walk.
Maya: Cool. See you at 11. Don't wear those ugly rain boots.
Ethan smiled slightly, setting his phone down just as the moka pot started letting out its loud, gurgling hiss. He poured the thick dark coffee into his favorite cracked mug, added a splash of milk, and walked over to his small living room window.
Outside, the street was quiet. A couple of cars crawled past, their tires making wet shrr-shrr noises on the asphalt. Across the alleyway, he could see the back of a grocery store where a guy in a yellow poncho was tossing wooden pallets into a stack.
It was a completely ordinary, boring Thursday morning.
He sat down on his couch—a cheap, grey fabric sofa he’d bought from IKEA three years ago that was infinitely better than the brown floral monster he’d tossed into the dump yesterday—and picked up a half-read paperback novel from the coffee table.
For the next hour, he just sat there in the quiet room, sipping his warm coffee, reading, and listening to the rain beat against the glass.
No squeaky doors, no Julian flexing his speaker cables, no heavy furniture, no Leo dropping tape cases behind the counter.
Just quiet.
At ten-forty5, Ethan finally stood up, stretched his stiff legs until his knees let out a loud pop, and walked into his bedroom to find a pair of jeans that didn't have grease stains on them.
He picked out a plain navy blue sweater, put on his least-dirty pair of sneakers, and grabbed his raincoat from the hook by the door.
Before he left, he looked in the bathroom mirror. The black smudge on his nose from the WD-40 was long gone, but he still had a small red mark near his hairline from where he’d bumped his head while lifting the couch yesterday.
"Good enough," he muttered to himself, pulling his hood up and stepping out into the hallway, locking the door behind him.
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